pride 2022 - a retrospective
Pride month is officially over and somehow, the world is worse for it. Two weeks ago someone killed two and injured twenty-one of us in one of the supposedly safest cities in the world. A painful reminder that despite all the progress, we’re never really safe. I remember first reading the article, remember my eyes filling with tears, anger welling up in my throat and deep fear clenching low in my gut. In the national news they call it an act of terrorism and that makes me want to throw up. Because it was, but not primarily. First and foremost, it was a hate crime against queer people and I desperately need them to say the words at least once, to admit to it, out loud and where everyone will hear it.
In the US Roe vs. Wade fell and now the community is in panic over what that might mean for our future. Even here, an ocean away, in a country where marriage equality is younger than it is in the US, where socio-cultural change is often heavily influenced by the American trajectory. Afraid of what else they might try to take from us. And as our siblings in the US are advised to have their marriage and adoption paperwork ready, to get in touch with legal council, to rally and to fundraise and to organize resistance, all we can do is watch from the sidelines, paralyzed by abject horror. Certain in our knowledge that they will eventually also come for queer rights, that they’ll go after our families, and even if we do everything necessary to make sure we’re ready, it might not be enough.
Earlier in the month, a world-famous Hollywood actress was forced to come out after a newspaper threatened to out her against her will. In the newspaper’s followup article, she was then accused of ungrateful behaviour for spoiling their story. All of this happened in a supposedly liberal country. It seems like we forgot it was only five years ago same sex marriage was legalized in that country at all. Only five years since the right ran a hateful campaign against it. Forgot there are still countries where they’d happily lock us away, happily execute us. Do you think of my family's blood running down the streets in invisible rivers when you spend your summer vacations comfortably slurping fruity cocktails on their sunny beaches? Do you consider the fact that I can’t go there without fearing for my life before you book your flights? Does it bother you?
In this current era of social media those terrible news stories were all over the feeds of the people I follow. All over queer content creators’ channels and my queer friends’ channels, but on none of the straights’. The hateful treatment of Rebel Wilson, the fear for gay rights after the historically horrific supreme court ruling and the shooting in Oslo were issues every gay and trans person I know had heard about but none of the heteros had. Still haven’t, for the most part. The uncomfortable truth is: We don’t get the privilege of ignorance. So we hear and we know and we’re fucking afraid. Afraid for our futures, our bodily integrity, our relationships, our children, our happiness, our lives.
Fact is, even after all this time, they’re still after us, still trying to kill us, everywhere, all the time. Fact is I still don’t kiss my girlfriend goodbye and I still brace myself for a fight holding her hand at night and I still pray no one notices I’m neither fully female nor fully male when I make my way home, baseball cap pulled deep into my averted eyes. Every day I get insulted, sexualized, threatened, disrespected, patronized and questioned by everyone from strangers in public bathrooms to my own fucking family. Every day the people who claim to care don’t give a shit. Because when it really comes down to it, does anyone who isn’t one of us ever really stand up for us? Even now we have to protect ourselves. Can’t you see that we’re all struggling for our lives here?
How much do you hate me? How little does my life mean to you? Would you grieve, was I shot a day from now? Assaulted? Demeaned? Do you care that I was, I am, every day? What would it do to you if I told you about the time my friend got punched in the face for being out with another man or all the times a girlfriend and I were stalked and leered at and touched and threatened with rape? You claim to love me, yet you watch me die a little every time it happens and claim I’m overreacting, claim I’m greedy. And so I dare you to fire the gun yourself. If you want me gone, shoot me! I can’t get any more afraid, can’t get any more angry, can’t possibly bear any more grief.
The newspapers still reporting on the story in Norway keep calling the shooter an „islamist terrorist“. Of course the motive’s not confirmed yet. But while no one seems to be willing to go out on a limp and call it an anti-queer hate crime, they’re all perfectly comfortable throwing around the term „islamist terrorist attack". Why only speculate about the latter? Why not put the possibility out there that it might have been targeted directly at us. To be perfectly honest, I don’t really care about the motive. Religious extremism, right wing nationalism, mental health issues - in the end, no matter the motivation, the story always ends with us dead. And I understand that from some angles the „why“ is extremely relevant. But in this context: Who gives a shit? Someone tried to kill a bunch of queer people. We were the target. Someone wanted us to stop existing, wanted us to live in fear. If that isn’t anti LGBTQ terror, what is?
So stop telling me about the shooter’s background, his nationality, his religion! Too many of my supposed bothers and sisters, looking exactly like me, sharing the exact same upbringing, exact same cultural background, have stepped on me, spit on me, beaten me down. The first people to spew hatred against me and my kind were those who sat next to me in the sandbox in kindergarten and on the church pew on Sundays. They knew exactly what they were doing. To them I was an equal, a friend, a human being, until all of a sudden, I wasn’t. Now it’s time to face the music. You never had any qualms denying me my humanity. You planted the seed. You’re the ones killing me, collectively, and I can’t take it anymore. Won’t take it anymore.
In the countryside, visiting the village I grew up in, I hold my breath, waiting for the hate crime to happen to me. Waiting for someone to break the scornful silence and shout at me as I walk past, for the sneering pack of teenagers to surround me and push me to the ground while everyone else in this supposed community turns a blind eye.
And so I promise to never go back. Just please spare me, please let me live, please let me be happy, please grant me some semblance of a life worth living!
When I got the news of the attack I sat on my bed, tears streaming down my face, desperately longing for something to break, for something to hold my rage. Today as a lesbian, as a visibly gender nonconforming person, as a non-binary person, I’m so fucking afraid for my life I barely know how to function anymore.
Every year there are hundreds of attacks on us in my country alone, over a hundred of them violent, numbers continually on the rise. Yet the government refuses to even properly count them. We’re invisible because you do not want to see us. Because you do not want to face our pain and your own culpability, the part you continue to play in this unrelenting campaign against our humanity. I will. I feel every single shred of suffering. Each blow rips out a part of myself that’ll never grow back, steadily eating away at my ability to love and hope and trust. I know they’re just a number to you. But to me, these are my brothers and sisters beaten and bruised, my kind murdered. My family committing suicide in terrifying numbers. To me, every single lost soul is personal. So please, if there is any mercy in the world at all, tell me how to save even one of them.
Will you care when it’s me limping home, me running from a threat, me who can’t stop shaking? Do you care that it has been me, has been my friends, has been my lovers? Do you mind that in school they didn’t teach me I had any right to exist? That all the official books either denied our existence or demonized it? That the teaching materials called us slurs? That no one ever intervened in the yard or classroom when we got bullied, got insulted, got ridiculed and excluded and mocked and attacked for who we are? Do you remember our teachers not calling students out on using the word „faggot“? Cause I sure do.
Do you remember the girl who lost almost all of her friends after she started dating another girl? Who everyone talked about even though it wasn’t our secret to share? Do you remember the little boy who cried after they kept calling him gay because he liked musicals and nice clothes? The one who transferred because of it? Do you ever wonder why there were zero people who came out voluntarily in a school with eight hundred students? Because I fucking do. It keeps me up at night, trying and failing to make sense of all that useless suffering. And I’m sure they remember it too. That shit stays with you. When all you get is hate and hate and hate, no matter how far you run, those experiences haunt you for life.
You claim to be my friends, yet the only people who ever showed up for me were queer themselves. Do you feel guilty for abandoning me, over and over again?
I hope you do! I hope the regret gives you half as much pain as this existence gives me. I’m gay, I’m trans, I’m queer and I do not forgive you.
